BILL'S HARD DRIVE — MICROSOFT EYES SEARCH GIANT IN PROPOSED TAKEOVER — Stung by the loss of Internet advertising firm DoubleClick to Google last month, Microsoft has intensified its pursuit of a deal with Yahoo!, asking the company to re-enter formal negotiations, The Post has learned.

Microsoft, Yahoo Reconsider Merger — A year ago, Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. explored the idea of combining to form a greater competitor to Google Inc. — The talks led nowhere leaving Microsoft and Yahoo to forge their own paths in pursuit of Google. How did they do? Well, they're talking again.

Microhoo - The much ballyhooed talks are off — So much for the Goldman Sachs' arranged marriage of Yahoo and Microsoft. It didn't even merit an episode on Blind Date! The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the talks are well not happening. They had talked, briefly …

WSJ: Yahoo, Microsoft talks no longer active — The Yahoo-Microsoft talks are apparently no longer active, according to the Wall Street Journal, which just updated its story. — The Journal reports: … Earlier today, I asked whether this Yahoo-Microsoft chatter was for real this time.

Google Negotiating Buy-out of Simply Hired — Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdry says that Google is stepping up its efforts to buy VC-backed SimplyHired. The job search engine most recently made news with the launch of its job-o-matic which creates widgets for bloggers to create …

Google In Talks To Acquire SimplyHired — Rumors surfaced today that Google is in discussions to acquire job search engine Simply Hired. Trip Chowdry, a research analyst at Global Equity Research first spoke about it, and the story was then picked up by Alarm:Clock.

Lean and Mean — Last year I wrote a series of columns on management problems at IBM Global Services, explaining how the executive ranks from CEO Sam Palmisano on down were losing touch with reality, bidding contracts too low to make a profit then mismanaging them in an attempt to make a profit anyway …

What Happened at Digg? — The firestorm that erupted at Digg earlier this week over a censored post has led to a lot of discussion about the nature of censorship in a world where everyone is a publisher. Called "The Great Digg Revolt," by some, the incident illustrated how much power users …

YouTube facing football lawsuit — The English Premier League is to sue video-sharing site YouTube for alleged copyright infringement. — The football organisation said YouTube had "knowingly misappropriated" its intellectual property by encouraging footage to be viewed on its site.

Technorati Adds Authority to SERPs — After reading Neil's post about Pronet Advertising, Search Engine Land and Online Marketing Blog making Technorati's Popular 100 list, I thought I'd search T'rati a bit more and noticed an Authority score starting to appear next to the blogs in the search results.

Google Gadgets are now an AdSense unit — Webmasters will soon be able to auction off widget space on their sites and blogs managed and marketed by advertising powerhouse Google. Advertisers will produce a Google Gadget in standard IAB unit sizes for distribution across the Google network at CPC or CPM billing rates.

Intel web tablet SoC to cut power consumption by 20x — Receive the days biggest stories by email, sign up here — Come 2010, UMPCs will consume only a twentieth of the power last year's models did and a fifth of the company's next-generation UMPC platform, Intel forecast last night.

OverHear.us: Corporate Gossip 2.0 — If you're like most people, you've probably had your fair share of bad managers and misdirected corporate initiatives, leading to grumbling around the office. It's hard to tell the person signing your check that their the problem and not all of us …